As if "Tickle-me Elmo" wasn't bad enough, now the Sesame Workshop -- makers of Sesame Street -- have to come along and whip children into a frenzy over smartphones and tablets.

At a humorous section in Qualcomm Inc.'s (QCOM) Tuesday morning presser, Sesame Workshop director and chief operating officer H. Melvin Ming talked about how he never knew what he was going to face for the day -- adults or screaming kids. He quipped, "I'm relieved to be in a room today with tech-savvy adults."

Soon Grover took to the stage for a jaw-dropping (for Grover at least) demo of a hot new high tech toy from Sesame Workshop. The Sesame Street Playset is a series of nondescript blocks, but it uses Qualcomm's Vuforia -- an augmented reality (AR) and 3D modelling suite -- to bring the objects to life.

By taking pictures of the 3D characters (think little Sesame Street action figures), Bert and Ernie sprung to life on the smartphone/tablet, talking to the observer. You could take more pictures of objects to add more vibrant objects to the room -- such as a TV that insulted Grover's waiting skills and a jukebox.

Of course the thing is a great deal for both Sesame Workshop, Qualcomm, and smartphone/tablet-makers everywhere because in order to get this hot new toy you have to both buy the playset and a compatible Qualcomm-equipped smartphone or tablet.

But ponying up the likely $300+ USD cost of the system is for a good cause, they insist as the playset reportedly helps children build:

social skills

language skills

creativity

Grover drew slightly less enthusiasm from the audience for his promised upcoming electronic eggbeater. But can you blame him for trying?

I've heard of some interesting developments regarding Autism and computers. There are people working on projects that tries to facilitate communication for autistic people by allowing them to use an approach that they may have an easier time dealing with, rather than speech or text.

As an example, instead of typing on a keyboard, they are shown images on a touchscreen interface that symbolizes part of what they want to say. Needless to say, every autistic person is different, and that only helps some of them, so this is only one of the approaches that they are trying.